Compiled together with Lindy Stiebel.
Digital heritage and community
Memories of Inanda: Edward Ximba
Mwelela Cele interviews Edward Ximba as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme. Mr Ximba discusses the Shembe Church.
Nazareth Baptist Church (Alternatively called “The Nazarite Church” “iBandla lamaNazaretha”, or the “Shembe Church”) is an African Initiated Church founded by Isaiah Shembe in 1910.
It has approximately 4 million members. The religion bans smoking, drinking, and fornicating. It is seen as a mixture of Zulu tradition and Christianity. It reveres Isaiah Shembe as an African Messiah and emphasises the Ten Commandments.
Gardening goes digital
Article published on Sprig blog in the SA Garden magazine.
Article in Art South Africa
I published an article in Art South Africa magazine, on an interesting outsider artist in Durban.
Profile piece ‘Brothers Green’ in Sunday Tribune
Interviewed for an article in the Sunday Tribune.
Midlands Writers Trails
Midlands Writers Trails, compiled together with Lindy Stiebel. Writers featured include Imraan Coovadia, Wilbur Smith, Fred Khumalo, Jenny Hobbs and John van der Ruit while stops include Michaelhouse, Hilton College, Caversham Mill and Press, the Howick Falls and the Mandela Capture site.
Memories of Inanda: Musawenkosi Cele
Mwelela Cele interviews Musawenkosi Cele as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme.
Mr Cele discusses his ancestral home, which housed the first doctor’s surgery and post office in Inanda.
Memories of Inanda: Ela Gandhi
Mwelela Cele interviews Ela Gandhi as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme. Ela discusses her grandfather Mahatma Gandhi, the Phoenix Settlement and her work as an activist and politician.
Ela Gandhi (born July 1, 1940), granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi is a peace activist and was a Member of Parliament in South Africa from 1994-2004, where she aligned with the African National Congress (ANC) party representing the Phoenix area of Inanda in the KwaZulu Natal province. Her parliamentary committee assignments included the Welfare, and Public Enterprises committees as well as the ad-hoc committee on Surrogate Motherhood. She was an alternate member of the Justice Committee and served on Theme Committee 5 on Judiciary and Legal Systems.
Shot at the the Durban University of Technology in April 2010
Memories of Inanda: Thulasizwe Goba
Mwelela Cele interviews Thulasizwe Goba as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme.
Along the Way
Along the Way is a book inspired by Doung Anwar Jahangeer‘s CityWalk. In December 2007 a call went out to Durban’s creative community inviting proposals for an upcoming art festival, Cascoland. Under the theme of “mobility,” the festival was to take place along a specified route with the aim of interaction with public space. As we walked the city it became apparent that the route was less about the buildings, walls and roads;the traditional infrastructure of the city;and more about the people we met along the way. We decided to focus on these people, to celebrate their lives in some small way.
A Case Study in Community-Focused Indigenous Knowledge Management
I contributed to a book on knowledge management for development, focusing on my work with the Libraries and Heritage Department. Its available on Amazon for a crazy expensive price!
Prevailing ideas about knowledge management in post-apartheid South Africa have been marked by notions of redress, the recognition of previously marginalized narratives and categories such as intangible heritage and indigenous knowledge. Key to these developments has been a democratizing turn, a participatory approach to the development and management of knowledge resources. Born of changes in the broader political context and the policy environment, the Ulwazi Programme is a new South African heritage initiative that has been set up by the eThekwini Municipal Library’s Libraries and Heritage Department to preserve and disseminate indigenous knowledge of local communities in the greater Durban area. The Programme, in the form of a localized Wiki, functions as a collaborative online archive of local knowledge and histories that are collected from the community by volunteer fieldworkers and then shared via the Internet and on cell phones. This utilization of a combination of open-source and social media applications for archival and heritage purposes is unique in South Africa. The chapter presents the structure and the implementation details of this indigenous knowledge preservation system.
- Publisher: Springer US
- Publication Date: 2014
- Publication Name: Knowledge Management for Development: Domains, Strategies and Technologies for Developing Countries
SA Blog Awards
For those of you who follow us on Twitter or are fans on Facebook, this is old news, but last Saturday Grant (aka mol-d) attended the SA Blog Awards at the One and Only hotel in Cape Town where Sprig won the Best Green Blog for 2010.
Other winners include the Best Travel Blog (www.getaway.co.za/page/blog), the Best Group Blog (www.rlabs.org), the Best Photographic Blog (www.guywithcamera.co.za) and the Best South African Podcast Blog (www.zanews.co.za).